“The iPad is an ambitious product that’s hard to sum up in a few words, or to assess at all until it’s actually available for sale, which won’t be for weeks,” Harry McCracken reports for FOXNews.com. “Herewith, some early answers to major questions about the device, based on what I learned at Apple’s launch and the hands-on time I got with one after the great unveiling concluded.”

• What’s the keyboard like? Better than I expected
• What’s the software situation going to be like? Iit’ll work with more than 150,000 programs on the day it ships
• What are the device’s biggest limitations? If you want to import your digital camera photos directly into it, you’ll need to buy a clunky-looking external adapter [and] there’s no way to print from the device

MacDailyNews Note: We’ve heard a rumor that Bluetooth and WiFi printing capability will be available when iPad ships. Apple is working on additional iPad features and capabilities that remain unannounced.

• Is the price really as unbelievable as Steve Jobs thinks? Apple is pricing its tablet to move… with its aluminum case and high-end display, it outclasses similarly-priced netbooks from the standpoint of pure aesthetics
• How about getting an iPad instead of Amazon’s Kindle or another e-reader? iPad is going to be a formidable Kindle rival. Amazon’s e-reader is a one-trick pony (albeit an impressive one) with a screen in dull black and white; the iPad is in glorious color and e-reading will be only one of many things it’ll let you do

Huh?!? How is Steve “more defensive”? Did you interview him, cause I don’t think he has said a word about it publicly. Oh, you mean that internal Town Hall meeting where there’s no actual record of what he said? We’ve already seen a bunch of people paraphrase what he said differently.

When will they stop comparing the iPad to the Kindle? That is like comparing a Rolls Royce to a golf cart.
There is no comparison. They are not in the same league. The have one minor similarity (ebook reading) and the iPad outshines the Kindle in that.

It will be a success purely because the print and media industry have gotten tired of their hard work being sucked up by “Do no evil” empires without cash exchange. Amazon have been the first to feel the heat, others will follow in a domino cascade style building to a waterfall collapse. As publishers begin to realize monitory gains via the iPad, they will just a the recording industry did, wail over how much commission they are giving away, even though I suspect they have learnt that lesson by now.

Google had better brace themselves for a collision with an iceberg. Publishers will be able to reap advertising cash from magazines sold on the iPad, cash that will not come in via Google or even Apple but by their existing Ad. departments. Advertising agencies will change the way they create ads. as they will be published with a push of a button. Ads will be monitored for effectiveness as people click or not on them.

In conclusion, my prediction that the iPad was going to be apps driven has turned out to be 98% correct, thus negating the power of the browsers, very soon, browsers will become just another set of apps. The most used app will become the must have outlet for advertisers and thus the most lucrative and influencial.

@ Question: Are we already going to start abbreviating the iPad and call it “the pad”?

Why is the iPod touch called an iTouch?

I never hear anyone say iNano or iShuffle.

And are we so f%@#*ng lazy that we cannot put the upper and lower case letters in the proper place when we write iPod or iPod touch or iPad etc.? Not even the sellers of the products and accessories get it right. What a pathetic excuse for a schooling system we must have, or is it that nobody has any discipline anymore?

News flash: You’ll need a printer, if you want to print. So no, you can’t print directly from the iPad. (Just the kind of brilliant insight you’d expect from Fox “News!”)

But if you have an app like Air Sharing Pro ($10), you can print from the device. Even on the iPhone, that app lets you import photos from your photos library, or select files from an iDisk, FTP site, your computer, or whatever. Then you can print to a printer. The only catch is that you have to have a Mac connected to the printer and have Printer Sharing turned on. But for everybody reading this site that doesn’t seem like a big hassle.

Interesting if you can email a pdf, then printing is available via the recipient mac. However, Apple is good a kneecapping their new technology to not cannibalize their other products. For example, you KNOW there’s the circuitry for a camera and voice input for phone usage as well already in the iPad…. and why no USB port? Each one of these gives update paths for the next versions.

“What are the device’s biggest limitations? If you want to import your digital camera photos directly into it, you’ll need to buy a clunky-looking external adapter [and] there’s no way to print from the device”

In this economy EVERYONE is worried. Jobs should especially worry about the self-imposed limitations – 3G price, bluetooth, camera. The disc space pricing seems to be the usual APPLE gouging of customers as well.

What I want to know, if Apple can produce something like this for $499, why does the iPhone cost so much? The company is between a rock and hard place with that hardware. They really can’t unlock/unsubsidize the iPhone because ATT couldn’t stand the hit and would drop it as a product.